How to restore a mystery house outside Atlanta

Sunday

Jul 21, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Julie Lasky THE NEW YORK TIMES

Lucia and Jim Case were living in the affluent Buckhead district of Atlanta and watching their children depart from their square, stolid house when they decided they needed a home that better suited their personalities.

“We were never quite comfortable there,” Jim Case, a 58-year-old structural engineer, said of the formal setting.

The house they found in the nearby suburb of Decatur was a different animal. With its sinuous lines, stone façade and low, sloping roof, it looked like a residence for gnomes. Built in 1929, with a 1950s addition, it had been vacant for two years.

And it had a mystery that put the bird-dogging research instincts of Lucia Case, 61, into overdrive: All evidence, including the declaration of its former owner, who had lived there for more than 50 years, pointed to the likelihood that it had been designed by the celebrated architect Ernest Flagg. But no records could be found that connected him to the house, or indeed to any house in Georgia.

A Beaux-Arts trained architect, Flagg (1857-1947) designed the Singer Building in New York and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, among other commissions, before devoting his career to small houses. He was an apostle of efficient design, reviling cellars as hellholes of dampness and attics as reservoirs of junk. His gabled roofs had dormer windows at the ridgelines to draw up air for passive cooling, and his interiors were cleared of any cavities that wasted building material.

All of these features could be found in the gnome home, plus a host of other details so idiosyncratic that the Cases concluded that Flagg must be the architect. Who else would build on a precise 3-foot-9-inch grid so that the ceilings were exactly twice that value (7 feet high) at their lowest point? Who else would create 16-inch-thick solid stone and concrete exterior walls, and two-inch-thick interior partitions made of jute cord and plaster?

The couple paid $550,000 for the house in 2008, and with Peter Block, an Atlanta architect, and a team of builders and craftsmen, they spent the next three years resolving another conundrum: how to restore it in a way that was true to its presumed architect's principles without compromising their own tastes and comfort.

For all its innovation, the house was poorly suited to the Georgia climate. No air conditioner had ever been installed. In winter, a subgrade furnace blew hot air through a single giant duct. So part of the $850,000 renovation involved new heating and cooling systems, Jim Case said. Installing them was made more challenging by the absence of hollow spaces for ductwork, requiring that trenches be dug into the concrete walls.

The Cases also added a 10-foot-deep glass-and-steel extension in back to enlarge the area that currently serves as their living room and expand views onto their almost six-acre property. They turned the original lengthy living room, with its soaring copper fireplace, into the dining room so they could entertain a large number of guests. The original dining room is now an open kitchen.

Everywhere, the emphasis is on materiality and craft. Walls are hand-plastered. Ceiling beams and kitchen cabinetry are salvaged Georgia pine. And doorknobs, drawer pulls and stair railings are hand-wrought steel. As a result, finishes and details are the substance of the décor, complemented by furnishings collected over the years with an eye to simplicity.

One of several interior designers they consulted advised them to chuck this stuff and start over. “You have a treasure,” she told Lucia Case. “You have to be careful what you put in it. I consider your style as Monastic Modern.”

But the Cases are done with such decisions. The furniture stays. As Jim Case said, “We're not as devout as we should be.”